On 7/7/07, dmitrey <openopt@ukr.net> wrote:
> I guess they don't want to explain each time what does
> "scikits.optimize" (or like that) mean. They want their work to be 100%
> belonging to their own department, and found only *OPT to be appropriate
> vendor for the product, like PENOPT or our SolvOpt are. Also, they want
> to have possibility to remain the same name for any other lang (they
> say: who knows, maybe ruby of fortress or something else will made
> python/scipy obsolete very soon? and efforts for the brand (or vendor?
> excuse my English) will be just waste of time?)
Hey Dmitrey,
First, I want to say that from what I can see it looks like your SoC
project is going very well. I may well be misunderstanding some of
the issues with your Department and I am not sure what the outcome of
that discussion was, so please forgive me if that is the case. Any
way, I will add my comments to help make clear my position.
1. I think that it is great that your Department has released so much
open source code and it certainly makes sense that they want to brand
their code.
2. You SoC of code project was accepted by the Python Software
Foundation for you to work on the SciPy project and not your
Department's OpenOpt project. OpenOpt is not a Google mentoring
organization and it isn't a Python project.
3. Your project, which isn't being paid for by your Department, is a
SciKit. You are the main developer of a new SciKit optimization
project, which is based on your experience with OpenOpt as well as
other optimization projects.
4. It doesn't seem that the OpenOpt project has any interest in
including any Python code any way.
5. Your SciKit is not being developed or maintained by OpenOpt developers.
6. You are all ready planning to include Matthieu's Python
optimization code in your scikit. That is clearly not related to
OpenOpt.
Given all this I think it is reasonable to conclude that your SciKit
is technically not part of your Department's OpenOpt project. As
such, code design and naming conventions for your SciKit should
conform with SciPy standards and not OpenOpt ones.
I am very happy with the work you are doing and have no interest in
harming your Academic career or your standing in your Department. At
this point it seems like there are some personal and professional
issues that need to be resolved between you and your Department. I
want to make absolutely sure that your Department doesn't feel that
they are being taken advantage of and that you aren't put in bad
standing with them either. At this point, I think we should move the
discussion revolving around these political issues into a private
discussion with your SoC mentors.
Thanks,
--
Jarrod Millman
Computational Infrastructure for Research Labs
10 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley
phone: 510.643.4014
http://cirl.berkeley.edu/